"Horrible! horrible! ... down! down! down! ... What was I saying?"
CHAPTER XXXV
Doom
Outcast—Spectres—Conscience—Tracked—Vanity—Scylla— Charybdis—José—Faithful unto Death
Within a few miles of Calatayud, a narrow path, little more than a foot-track, leads down from the hills on to the highroad to Saragossa. Just before joining the highway, the path winds between two low bluffs that screen it from the sight of wayfarers below. Indeed, any muleteer or arriero unacquainted with the country might almost pass unawares the spot where road and hill-path meet, so completely is it hidden by the ash-gray contours of the hills.
About the time when Jack dismounted at the gate of the Casa Alvarez, a man was making his way downward along this narrow track, urging a heavily-laden mule with low cries to hasten its flagging pace. He was a young man, in the costume of a muleteer; his cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes unnaturally bright. Every now and again he would throw an anxious backward glance over his shoulder, not consciously, as if he feared pursuit, but as though in obedience to some impulse of which he was hardly aware.
When he approached the point where the track joined the road he stepped to the mule's head and brought the animal to a stand-still, looking from left to right as if in doubt. After a moment's hesitation he tied the mule to one of the rare saplings that grew at the side of the track, and advanced warily towards the highway, pausing at short intervals, and bending his head forward to listen. There was no sound save the silver trill of a lark far above, and the soughing of a light breeze as it lapped the edges of the hills. The man moved forward again, still more cautiously; rounding a knoll, he came to the road, that stretched in gentle undulations for several hundreds of yards in a straight line east and west. No one was in sight. The man gave a sigh of relief, followed by one of those quick uneasy backward glances that seemed to be habitual with him. Rapidly scanning the road once more, he returned to the mule, released the bridle from the tree, and slowly led the laden animal down the path.
He was within a dozen paces of the dusty highway when he halted suddenly, dragging heavily upon the reins. His dusky, olive-hued features paled, the hand that grasped the bridle trembled nervously; his whole attitude was one of dire apprehension. For a moment he stood intently listening, his eyes fixed in a wide stare; then, wheeling the mule sharply round and prodding the weary beast desperately with the knife he drew from his belt, he raced back along the track. For a full quarter of a mile he continued his upward course; then he stopped, and again turned his head towards the road in the attitude of listening. At first he could hear nothing but the throbbing of his heart and the quick breathing of the mule by his side; but gradually the clatter of many hoofs on the hard road became more and more audible through the clear air, though the horsemen were hidden from view by the obstructing hills. They arrived at what he judged to be the place he had just left. He heard "Halt!" in a rough stentorian tone. The voice was Spanish, and its effect on the anxious listening man was as that of a galvanic shock. With a smothered cry he dashed forward, dragging the unwilling mule, which he goaded with alternate stabs of the knife and whispered words half of menace half of entreaty.
There was no halting now. For mile after mile they continued their flight, until, when both mule and man were exhausted, they at length stopped at the edge of a wild gorge high up in the mountains. There, for the first time since he fled the voice, the man looked carefully around. The place was evidently new to him. In his flight he had diverged at the first opportunity from the track, along which he had come, not then alone, earlier in the day. The new path was more difficult than the old; it wound away from his obvious destination; it led, indeed, almost due north into the heart of the mountain country—the Sierra de Moncayo, the precipitous granite range where King Æolus had his mythic throne. But the fugitive knew not, cared not, whither he went, so long as it was away from the voice of his countrymen. And he avoided, with the shrinking of dread, the track he knew.
One thing was remarkable during his late impetuous flight. He seemed to have forgotten his strange trick of glancing backward over his shoulder. Many times he turned half round to see if he was followed, but consciously, less abjectly, for all his panic fear.